The Fog of Diplomacy and War

The current Ukraine crisis has laid bare the need to have a hard conversation about NATO.

Photo: CBC

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It is a maxim of successful diplomacy—or any negotiation, really—to make a true effort to understand how the other side is thinking, what is their world view and how do they understand their own interests.

The weeks of jockeying and statement-making by numerous governments of Member States of the NATO Alliance, especially the United States, by NATO itself, by leaders of the Ukrainian Canadian community in Canada, and by the Russians and the Ukrainians, have been characterized by much posturing and advocacy of all kinds. There is at least one fundamental difference between the American and Western incantations, on the one hand, and Russian ones, on the other—the West no longer knows much about the Russians despite having large intelligence-gathering services while the latter know a lot about the United States and other Western countries. One could call it asymmetrical understanding.

The root of this asymmetry lies in the end of the Cold War and differing perceptions of what that signified. In general, in the United States and elsewhere, the mood was triumphant and the tone gloating. Russia in the guise of the former Soviet Union had been defeated and confined to the dustbin of history, culminating in the universal victory of liberal democracy and the very “End of History.” The Russian view of this event was of course quite different, where the decision to move past Cold War antagonism towards some new kind of relationship, if not collaboration, was perceived to have been taken by equals.

As a direct consequence, the old infrastructure of Sovietology was largely dismantled in the West. After all, why spend large resources on studying and analyzing a defeated enemy?

The capacity of the West to understand the Russians was significantly weakened. Governments have embarked on Russia policies while flying rather blind and driven fundamentally by domestic political interests and calculations of various kinds. The disregard of expertise on Russia in the United States reached its apogee perhaps during the Trump Administration when the President reportedly assumed that his government’s prime expert on Russia, Fiona Hill, was an office secretary when she attended White House meetings. Ironically, the United States and Russia doubtless understood each other better during the Cold War itself. 

The period surrounding the end of the Cold War seeded another principal source of discord between Russia and the West, embodied in NATO. Around 1996, the eastward expansion of NATO was conceived and began to take root almost through osmosis. By 1999, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had been formally admitted into the security organization. At the time, George F. Kennan, the doyen of Soviet policy experts in the U.S. government during the Cold War and architect of a policy of containment of the then USSR, attempted to sound the alarm on NATO expansion, warning presciently on February 5, 1997:

[E]xpanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

The sting of NATO’s eastward expansion is made worse in Russian minds because of their perception of betrayal. A string of the senior most Western leaders at the end of the Cold War, including then American President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker and CIA Director Robert Gates, assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand after the Soviet Union withdrew forces from Eastern Europe. In 1990 Baker made his famous statement to Gorbachev directly regarding NATO expansion: “…not one inch eastward.” Gates himself criticized “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward, when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” We hear voices today asserting that the Russians invented these commitments. However, the National Security Archive at George Washington University published in 2017 a series of declassified documents, as well as an analysis of the materials, that demonstrate clearly that such assurances were made.

No one expects politicians to be consistent. But, at the same time, no one can then expect the Russians not to perceive ongoing NATO expansion as part of the same broken covenant or to distrust assurances.

In the absence of deeper appreciation of Russian history, various narratives about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motivations and strategic goals have been floated.

In one of these, he is terrified of an independent and democratic Ukraine. We know that Putin is not a democrat himself and he would doubtless prefer a pro-Moscow government in Kyiv. But it is an extrapolation to presume that he would invade Ukraine because he doesn’t want it to be democratic. He appears to have observed that democracies can be quite malleable because of all the jostling political interests.

The cost of becoming mired as an occupying force in a very large territory with a hostile population—when Russia is facing serious economic and social problems of its own as well as the constant threat of domestic terrorism and insurgencies in the North Caucasus—does not seem commensurate with any gain. An invasion of Ukraine in its entirety is a very different thing than annexing Crimea, where about two-thirds of the population are Russian and there is a narrower strategic interest in reacquiring the historic Russian Black Sea naval port at Sevastopol.

Another rather hyperbolic thesis states that we have before us an epic struggle between democracy and autocracy, in which all Western nations must stand their ground. One of the problems is that the defenders of the democracy side, the Member States of NATO, are not uniformly bastions of democratic values. Hungary, Turkey and even Poland come immediately to mind.

Another narrative trumpets the need to protect the sovereignty of Ukraine. One of the problems is that, in the case of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the United States maintains an operational military base in the national territory of another independent State, against that country’s express will and in violation of its sovereignty. Concerns about sovereignty can be selective.

Russian actions are more likely best seen in the context of longstanding Russian national-security interests, many of which date back to the Tsarist Empire. Russian national-security policy hinges on the concept of a buffer zone to protect it on its Western side from land invasion, what used to be called in Tsarist times the borderlands. They created strategic depth. This security concept no longer contemplates physical occupation of East European countries, as in the Cold War, but it does require some level of reliable security guarantees.

From a Russian perspective, the eastward expansion of NATO now encircles Russia and touches directly on Russian borders. Entry into NATO of Ukraine would present an exponentially greater threat to Russia’s perceived national security than anything that has come before. Why? Because, for the Russians, NATO equals the military power of the United States, which would place the U.S. at its doorstep in a neighbouring country the history of which has been intimately intertwined with that of Russia for well over a thousand years. This is nothing short of an existential threat for the Russians. Russia cares infinitely more about what Ukraine means than the West does.

There is another asymmetry at play vis-à-vis Ukraine, this time of core strategic interest.

Russians have exceptionally strong historic muscle memory. Russia has faced four foreign invasions, all from the West: the Swedes in the eighteenth century, Napoleon and the French in the nineteenth century and twice by the Germans in the twentieth century. This does not include two wars with the Turks, now also a NATO Member State. It is incomprehensible that the West, and especially the United States, should accept without reservation that it has valid national-security interests and yet seem to dismiss the idea that Russia would also have such valid interests.

It is plausible that the strategic objective of Putin is not invasion, which the President of Ukraine may have assessed based on his recent public statements. Rather, in the context of the above, he may be trying to shock the United States and NATO into having a serious discussion about NATO expansion and his perception of valid Russian national-security interests. The Russians believe that they have never been taken seriously on these issues, for which Putin has deep domestic support—among Great Russian nationalists and, indeed, more broadly.

The mission of NATO itself has appeared muddled over the years as it had to reinvent itself after the end of the Cold War. Is it essentially a military alliance to defend Western Europe? Is it a new political club to advance democracy that mirrors the European Union plus the United States and Canada? Does Western Europe now include Eastern Europe? Is it now essentially—again—an anti-Russia organization in its core mission? The current Ukraine crisis has laid bare the need to have a hard conversation about NATO (not just who is paying their dues) because lack of clarity has now grown dangerous.

It is not a question of being pro or anti-Russian, American or Ukrainian. It will not be easy to overcome generations of distrust, but the only sane way out of a continuing cycle of such disputes and incidents is consequential dialogue between the parties that attempts to really understand how the other side thinks and how to meet respective security interests.